Ordinary Expectation: Failure on the American Scene

Rural America is shaped by a conflicted sense of the ordinary: a place where a pastoral imagination of the countryside overlaps with, obscures, and, at times, is obscured by images of addiction and economic abandonment. This essay explores how these two senses of the ordinary are interdependent: how the possibility of a postindustrial future depends on the abjection of a deindustrial present. The essay approaches this problem through the analytic lenses of three scenes along a road known as “heroin highway” in rural New York. Tracing the ambivalence of these ordinary scenes makes it possible to see people and places excluded from the American dream as essential products of its logic.